REFLECTIONS ON THE NEW VISION

By Henry Luce III

ALFRED JENSEN thought about very big ideas, and he expressed them in very
loud tones. He believed in a universal order in the affairs of man, and in
an eternal order in the affairs of God. He believed that scientists, political
philosophers and artists would interact to identify a unity of truth. Jensen
was a worldly, and yet highly spiritual, artist of his time.

His professional life began as it ended, in the presence of death. "It
all began," he said, "when as a seven-year-old boy I faced death's
tragic implications. My mother had died and on a sunny afternoon I stood
before the orange colored oblong box ornamented with its kneeling silver
angels, their praying hands each pointing toward the cardinal directions.
I saw my mother's remains lowered into the darkness of the grave.... Preoccupied
with my early encounter with the mystery of death, my painterly effort has
centered around ... the light of life, the somberness of death, the color
of art, the designated pattern of phenomenal existence."

My own twenty-three year friendship with Al Jensen began the same way, albeit
figuratively. One day in 1958 I was wandering among some 57th Street galleries
and at Bertha Schaefer came upon an exhibition of Jensen paintings. Their
checkerboard patterns, their brilliant colors, their use of outlined images
to intrude on the then all too familiar mode of pure abstractionism, made
an instant impression on me. Among the many canvasses, which were smaller
than his later major works, my preference settled on one, entitled "Forsaken," which
in sombre brown and black checkers outlined the form of a crucified body.
This image was against a background of violet, red, blue and yellow checkers,
along with some white which increased proportionately from bottom to top
as if to show the way clear toward resurrection in the sky. I was struck
by the apparent symbolism in the colors of the emotions attendant on The
Crucifixion, violet for sadness, red for blood-letting violence, blue for
mystery, yellow for hope. It reminded me of Seurat's strong use of color
symbolism, his dominant red for a noisy, tempestuous night club, his blue
for ultimate mysteries of space beyond, his green for life and growth and
tranquility, his yellow for the joy of his circus scenes.

I ordered the picture and asked the gallery attendant if he could tell me
something about the artist, such as where he lived, for example. I was told
that he lived in New York. So I asked if, by chance, they had his phone number,
and they did. When I rang up Al Jensen, it was the only time I had ever called
an artist on the strength of viewing his work for the first time.

284 East 10th St., 1962

Al asked me to stop by his tiny studio at 284 East 10th Street. Its front
room was more than half consumed with stacks of canvasses. Al invited me
to sit on his other chair and started to recount his color theories, and
fragments of his life of world travels. I assumed that the apartment's back
room was a slightly more habitable bedroom, but I never saw it. Al's discourse
was engaging, if not hypnotic, as he ranged over subjects from his perceptions
of ancient civilizations to Goethe's analysis of prismatic light to experiences
in the studios and salons of Europe. I found the man fascinating. Whenever
it later was that I decided there was much that he said that I didn't understand,
I also decided that I wasn't going to let that bother me. And so a friendship
developed, and I found myself inviting Al to my home and looking upon him
as a man of judgment, someone to depend upon. I remember one evening I was
depressed by a personal problem and it was Al that I called. He said come
on over, apologizing for the fact that he had on hand only one bottle of
bad Rye, knowing by then that I preferred Scotch. As I sat with him in that
other chair, he reassured me greatly. It must be the only time in my life
that I drowned any sorrows in bad Rye.

Six months after the acquisition of "Forsaken," and my meeting
Al, he called me asking me to come by to look at a work. When I got to 10th
Street, he set about laboriously pulling canvasses out of the stack, barely
able to find space to line five of them up in a row for me. When he was done,
I reacted with an immediate, compulsive "Wow," a monosyllabic critique
which remained for long moments the only comment I could make of my first
viewing of "The Golden Rule," so great was its impact.

"The Golden Rule" is an epic story in symbolic painting of the
building of a Mayan pyramid. Along the way, it describes all the facets of
Mayan culture, the king's authority, the surveying of the farm lands, the
practices of sorcery, the constellation of divinities. Since Al was born
it was only natural in Guatemala and had an Indian nurse in his childhood,
for him to pick the Mayan as the first of the civilizations of antiquity
which he would interpret.

At that time, I was building the Time & Life Building. I must have told
Al many accounts of the complexities and difficulties of that project, for
I have the impression from Al, never but casually alluded to, that it may
have been part of his inspiration, by analogy, to do the Mayan pyramid builders.

After the first flush of emotion at my viewing of "The Golden Rule" had
subsided, I thought about how most artists never make any sense in words
of what they are trying to do in paint, and I thought of Dali's grandiose
self-promotions, which in the long term had to detract from the virtuosity
of his work. So I asked Al if he would write a paper explaining "The
Golden Rule," and that he did, five typed pages worth, one section explaining
his color theory and another outlining the legendary bases for his depiction
of the Mayan civilization.

Al Jensen had spent fifty-five years kicking about the world, picking up
experiences as a merchant sailor, studying with noted European painters,
hobnobbing in the international art world, trying to paint. But it was not
until his written statement about "The Golden Rule" that he articulated,
as he put it, his "experience of the New Vision." This new vision,
he said, told him that black and white checkers could describe "alternating
rythms in light and darkness" and that this process "reflects the
cycle of man's destiny: the vastness of my former fears of darkness were
resolved as I read first the dark square, then the light square, meaning
first night then day. I saw appearing as images the living followed by the
dying in my checkerboard existence. Since every black is followed by a white,
I found my place in eternity." It had taken Alfred half a century to
summon up his Vision—his Muse. For me, it was an exciting feeling to
be witness to its creation.

After I bought "The Golden Rule," it was exhibited at Martha Jackson
in 1959, along with some works of the next civilization that Al had gone
on to, the Spanish Renaissance and its conquistadores, arabesques and all.
The following year, Martha Jackson told me that the Museum of Modern Art
would be pleased if I were to donate a single-panel Jensen work entitled "Clockwork
in The Sky" to the museum, and so I said I would be delighted.

I then approached Al with the proposition that I would like to commission
him, on behalf of Time Inc., to do a mural which would reflect the several
major books which Life at that time had published, "History of World
War II," "World's Great Religions" and the like. Al threw
himself into this assignment with gusto, and surprised me when he called
me down to I Oth Street by displaying not one, but two versions of the proposed
mural. I said there was nothing for it but that I would have to have the
second version, which Al labeled "The Title Makers." Al's title
for the panel on "World's Great Religions" is typical of his persistent
hope. It was "Towards belief, clarity and order." Time Inc. decided
that its mural, the first version, would go to its Paris building, a regrettable
decision in view of the disastrous fire that occurred there in 1967 destroying
the mural along with two people. As luck would have it, it fell to me as
then London Bureau Chief to represent the company at the gracious observance
of sympathy arranged by our Paris neighbors.

In 1960, I went up to Boston to look at the new Institute of Contemporary
Art building which its then director, Thomas Messer, had just built, and
to look at the first show which he had called "The Image Lost and Found." The
show, which started with a Courbet, went through a lot of abstract expressionists,
and ended (would you believe?) with a Jensen, one that had a figurative image
emerging from all the checkers. I had developed a rapport with Tom when he
was mounting a show at the Time & Life Building Reception Center.

I received a letter from Messer, now director at the Guggenheim, under date
of August 28, 1961, saying, "Your original presentation of Alfred Jensen's
work has borne fruit since I gradually warmed up to him to the extent of
featuring him at the Guggenheim during September." This show consisted
of 16 Jensen canvasses all done in the three-month period April to July,
1961. They were inspired by the flight of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.
I also received a letter from Al Jensen dated the same day as the Messer
letter, saying "I offered (The Guggenheim) in your name the loan of
your mural The Title Makers. However, in view of the crowded condition at
the museum at the present moment Mr. Arnason (the curator) asked me to thank
you for your generous gesture!"

The following month the Guggenheim had a group show for which Arnason wrote
in the catalogue, "The group of geometric abstractionists who are now
attracting increasing attention, Kelly, Sander, Jensen, Stella, etc., many
of whom have actually been working in this direction for a long time, object
to being associated with the school of Mondrian or other pioneer purists
or constructivists. The reason for this is simply that they insist their
motivation is not a pure analysis of abstract form. Their concern is with
an abstract content or subject matter, with an expressive end rather than
a formal one. This raises the entire historic question of the relation of
content to abstract form; and in a sense this is the central question of
the present exhibition."

In response to this formulation, Al wrote me, "I think this wording
of my interest and purpose of painting is a good one. It applies to all my
work and leads me inevitably to my capacity to combine the language form
of painting with the expressive sign of meaning, and that accomplished will
carry me forward to take on a leading exponent's position of the art of our
time! It is not an easy task. However, for me it is a marvelous challenge.
So I continue my work and I fight against odds for honesty and truth in painting."

The following April, Al wrote me to report on a telephone conversation. "The
Modern Art Museum yesterday called me up to inquire whether I own a similar
picture to the "Clockwork in The Sky" owned by the museum and given
to them by your generous good will. The senator from New York, Mr. Javits,
wanted to borrow this picture to ornate (sic) his office in Washington, D.C.
However, the museum thinks this picture so beautiful that they'll not deprive
themselves of its presence for a year's term loan. Therefore, the museum
has requested of me to lend to the senator's office a similar picture. And
I have suggested they can pick one up from my studio. It's fun to see how
the acceptance of my work spreads more and more and it does me good to be
admired a bit, which is to say that the reward comes to one by trying and
trying again."

While Al's mind probed wide and deep to interpret great civilizations of
antiquity, he was disarmingly in awe of the trappings of the present one.
The simplicity of his lifestyle belied his drive for fame and fortune. In
this period, Al was beginning to achieve visibility in Europe, particularly
in Switzerland where the Kornfeld Gallery of Bern and Zurich took the lead
in giving him exhibitions. The crowning accolade came on the last evening
of January, 1964. From Basel, Al wrote me: "Last night the American
ambassador to Switzerland, William True Davies, the American cultural attaché,
the finance minister and the health minister of the Swiss government, the
president of the Basel Art Association, museum directors and the trustees
and collectors of Basel attended a dinner given in Franz Kline's and Alfred
Jensen's joint exhibitions. 700 invited artists and friends of art all over
Switzerland gave me a real ovation and the museum's director Arnold Rüdlinger
presented Mrs. Regina Jensen with a large bouquet of yellow tea roses and
it was a very important introduction for me because now I am regarded as
an international artist."

The Studio in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, as Al left it,
1981

Although Al identified with some established contemporaries, notably Mark
Rothko and Sam Francis, the former died early and the latter drifted away.
Al operated as a loner, showing no interest in most other contemporary art,
and cultivating an acute suspicion of art dealers, particularly those in
New York, which is why he bounced from one to another. More important to
the definition of an artist than his identity with any movement or school
is his clarity of purpose and strength of commitment, and these Al certainly
had in spades. That Al has a place in art 's mainstream, I have no doubt.
It is a stream which has many tributaries, of course. I think it is possible
to hypothecate that part of Al's aesthetic lineage came down a tributary
whose fountainhead is the sixteenth century dramatic colorist (and loner)
Matthias Grünewald, and which leads to Die Brucke (The Bridge) group
of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde, and on to Paul Klee, to Robert Delaunay's
Orphism and its American offshoot the Synchronism of Morgan Russell and Stanton
Macdonald-Wright. Many younger artists in America and abroad have been influenced
by Jensen's work. Among the younger generation, one who may have no conscious
reference to Jensen, but who is certainly a kindred spirit, is the leading
Australian painter Leonard French, who also extracts images from geometric
forms and turns them into powerful statements of spiritual conceptions.

Of his commitment to the evocation of ancient civilizations, Al wrote for
a Kornfeld catalogue four years ago, "The artist in me is not only seeking
a renewal of worn out visual representations, but is as well engaged in the
reestablishment of man's lost ties with the universal laws of nature. Today,
forgotten and ignored, these values of former times, now misunderstood, must
come back. I for one lend all my energy in dedication to attain this quest."

That year, the retrospective show, 1957-1977, went to the São Paulo
Bienal as the sole U.S. representative, a selection in which Messer was instrumental
(and from there to Buffalo's Albright-Knox, to New York's New Museum and
points west). Al's postcard from São Paulo said, "The top man
of the Bienal feels that my show is the most beautiful creation seen in all
the artists' work shown at São Paulo." I went to the opening
in Buffalo (in January) and was surprised, but honored, that Seymour Knox,
the museum's chairman and leading benefactor, asked me to speak. I used the
occasion to reminisce about my two decades with Al, those decades which coincided
with his development of the New Vision.

The last letter came three weeks before the end. The mind was wandering
from months of illness, but The Vision was clear. "We live now in an
epoch of revelation. The invisible forms are visible. We must extend our
horizon. Progress will be made in the future." Alfred Jensen has found
his eternity, here and in the hereafter. He has extended his horizon.